Watching the Pope and the President Roll Up Their Sleeves

WASHINGTON -- Well, he says a good Mass, I'll give him that—brisk, on point, despite all the folderol and whoopdedoo of the high pontifical ritual, and with all the runners-up in their tall white hats, watching him from below the high altar. (An alarming number of them, I guarantee you, were looking up there and thinking, "That could be me." I mean, what the hell, you should pardon the expression, "Bobby" Jindal still thinks he can be president.) I would serve a Mass for this guy, and I was good at that, except for the one time I nearly fainted on the groom because it was 900 degrees in the Church. The thurible made a nice racket as it bounced down the stone steps of the sacristy.

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And the man knows how to make an entrance. He came down the aisle of the basilica before vesting himself, surrounded by several of the more important second-place finishers, and with a big smile on his face. You could hear the roars from outside the basilica through the walls. And his homily was what you might have expected, with a shout-out to the Vatican II fathers in its references to the "people of god." Its general theme concerned welcoming the poor and the dispossessed into that fellowship and, by extension, the fellowship of common humanity. Like I said, the man says a good Mass, he does.

I thought the president did fairly well Wednesday morning. He put on his preacher's hat, but he didn't wave it around. There was just the right amount of gospel in his remarks.

You call on all of us, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, to put the "least of these" at the center of our concerns. You remind us that in the eyes of God our measure as individuals, and our measure as a society, is not determined by wealth or power or station or celebrity, but by how well we hew to Scripture's call to lift up the poor and the marginalized, to stand up for justice and against inequality, and to ensure that every human being is able to live in dignity –- because we are all made in the image of God.

Mr. President, I am deeply grateful for your welcome in the name of the all Americans. As a son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families.

And then, of course.

Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to our future generation. When it comes to the care of our common home, we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the change needed to bring about a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change. Such change demands on our part a serious and responsible recognition not only of the kind of world we may be leaving to our children, but also to the millions of people living under a system which has overlooked them. Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded, which cries out to heaven and which today powerfully strikes our homes, our cities, our societies. To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note, and now is the time to honor it.

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It is impossible to overestimate what a terrific touch the shout-out to Dr. King was. It puts the climate crisis directly on the same moral plane as the fight against racism and the struggle for human rights around the world. In fact, in everything he's said on the subject, the pope is demanding that a livable world is the ultimate human right.

Humanity has the ability to work together in building our common home. As Christians inspired by this certainty, we wish to commit ourselves to the conscious and responsible care of our common home.

So, eyes on the ball, OK? Papa Francesco has come to this country on a pastoral mission to remind the country's leaders that, as Dr. Johnson put it, "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization," and part of that decent provision for the poor is to find a way out of the existential planetary crisis that hits the poor hardest of all, that floods their homes and scorches their throats, that eradicates their villages and starves them to death.

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Truth be told, in that context, I might have found a better reason to throw a high mass on Wednesday than honoring the increasingly dubious legacy of Junipero Serra. (And having Native American drumming as part of the service, given what we know about Serra's treatment of the indigenous people of California, was just hopelessly tone deaf.) And yes, he's going to say some things about human sexuality that are going to make you want to tear your hair out and, if you want to see his remarks about "religious liberty" through the windows of a Hobby Lobby outlet, that's certainly your right. (The gang at America's foremost journal of white supremacy, found at the intersection of Cruel and Otherwise Unemployable have decided to hang their hoods on that.) But, as I said a while back, he's throwing a lot of that back into the parish confessional. That was how the damage of Paul VI's ghastly Humanae Vitae was undermined, one informed conscience at a time, until it is virtually a dead letter within the body of the Church. Papa Francesco talked to his bishops briefly about all the culture war malarkey, but he went out of his way to tell them that the Clan of the Red Beanie's talking angrily about denying communion to Catholic politicians is now not part of the program.

"I know full well that you face many challenges, that the field in which you sow is unyielding and that there is always the temptation to give in to fear, to lick one's wounds, to think back on bygone times and to devise harsh responses to fierce opposition. And yet we are promoters of the culture of encounter…"Harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a pastor, it has no place in his heart; although it may momentarily seem to win the day, only the enduring allure of goodness and love remains truly convincing."

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Instead, he is elevating poverty and the health of the Earth, and all of the shattered places where they intersect, above the more glandular concerns that have dogged the Church ever since Paul VI handed it the job of, as Garry Wills memorably put it, "the smithying of chastity belts." The rising sea level is now as important, if not more important, than the Pill, at least as far as the message of his mission here. The conditions leading to the wildfires in California are now as important, if not more important, as who marries whom in a civil ceremony across town. That speech to Congress tomorrow is going to be what the Fathers of the Church undoubtedly would have called, "a goddamned hoot and a half."

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